Eritrea

2009

It feels
like it happened just yesterday. It was 7 a.m. on an average day in September in
Asmara, Eritrea. My brain was still
reshuffling the information I had gathered about the terrorist attacks on the WorldTradeCenter a week earlier. I
was writing an article on it for the next issue of Setit,
the twice-weekly newspaper of which I was editor-in-chief.

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Articles published
in Eritrea's now-banned
private newspapers are at the center of a mock political trial
being filmed as an educational documentary this week at Sandra Day O'ConnorCollege
ofLaw at ArizonaStateUniversity. Inside a courtroom on the sprawling Tempe, Ariz.,
campus, a judge of the High Court of Eritrea presides dispassionately, international
observers lean into translation headphones, and defense lawyers challenge prosecutors
to detail the vague antistate charges against 11 political dissidents. It's a
trial that the real defendants were never afforded when they were jailed nearly
eight years ago.

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Last week, President Isaias
Afeworki of Eritrea,
Africa's leading jailer of journalists,
discussed press freedom during an extensive interview with Swedish
broadcaster TV4. Afeworki, a revered guerrilla
commander who led this Red Sea country to nationhood in 1993, banned Eritrea's
budding private media in 2001 and threw journalists in secret prisons without
charge or trial. Speaking to Swedish
journalist Donald Boström from his palace in the capital, Asmara, Afeworki, at left, took questions on the fate
of long-held journalist Dawit
Isaac, an Eritrean with Swedish citizenship, and lashed out at critics of
the country's press freedom record.